Living By Our Faith: Sermon for Proper 22C

Today we complete the five-week liturgical season of creation in the Episcopal Church. The season is planned so that it concludes with the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, which is celebrated yesterday, on October 4.

In yesterday's Beacon, I shared with you all a sweet story of St. Francis preaching to the birds about gratitude. In his Sermon to the Birds, the Saint noted that the birds receive everything they need for their not just survival, but flourishing, from the abundant creation God provides in all its complexity. If you remember, in the story the birds then flew into the sky, formed the shape of a cross, and then divided into four groups and flew away, each group in a cardinal direction, to share the gospel of Christ all over the world.

Francis's love of nature, and the way that his spirit was nurtured by the natural world as a living testament to God's mind-blowing love for us, is quite famous, and so tender. No wonder he is that patron saint for creation.

The readings we hear today however, are the readings regularly scheduled for this week, not the propers for our saint. And yet it is interesting to examine the way that the life of the saint intersects with our readings we just heard about having faith in God in the face of injustice.

For there was another side to Francis than just a tree-hugging nature lover. His story is also an incredible conversion story. In his youth, he had been a wealthy young man, born into a wealthy merchant family, and he lived the life of a playboy-- a kind of work hard, play hard kind of existence. He also became a soldier and fought in the Crusades, killing in the name of Christ as European armies attempted to win the Holy Lands from the control of Muslims. He was captured and imprisoned, became very ill, and was released to return home to recover. It was during the recovery that Francis began experiencing his first visions of the presence of Christ in his life. Francis abandoned his wealth, his privilege, renouncing them all, and soon became a wandering preacher who lived by begging from town to town, occasionally gathering followers as he went along.

Francis looked upon a church that at the time was a sponsor of warfare through the Crusades-- He himself knew that first hand. And yet the more that he preached and lived a life of poverty and simplicity in solidarity with the poor and the marginalized. He also realized that the gospel of Christ called him to renounce violence. As he went from town to town, he would great people by saying, " "Pace e Bene!" -- "Peace and goodness to you!"

He devoted himself so firmly to the cause of nonviolence and the renunciation of war that in 1219 he trailed behind crusaders heading for the next wave of fighting, and spent a year walking from Italy to North Africa, where the Sultan who led the Muslim armies was encamped. After pleading with the Cardinal who led the Christian armies to stop the violence and killing, and being turned back with scorn and derision, he then managed to gain an audience with the Sultan to urge the same thing, impressing the Sultan greatly by his humility and piety.

Francis did not succeed in his mission to either side, and the wars continued to rage on. Yet this aspect of the saint's life is where we see a connection with the readings that we have just heard. In our reading from Habakkuk, we hear yet another prophet they're crying the oppression of the poor and the lack of justice that is available in the land. God answers the prophets lament in the first half of our first reading by reminding The prophet, and all who listened to him, that God's will and God's justice are not based upon abstract principles of winning and losing, especially not of power and the will to use it. Instead, God joins the prophet in Condemning the perversion of justice that is pervading the government of Israel. Our brief reading ends with this observation: "Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith."

This declaration leads directly into the opening verses of our gospel passage. In the opening verse, we hear are apostles exclaim, "Increase our faith!" Jesus then goes on to tell the apostles that if they had the faith the size of a mustard seed, they would be willing to accomplish great things. It mustard seed of course was one of the tiniest of all seeds, then and now.

Surely, the apostles have faith that size. Surely the crowd's following Jesus have faith that size. Surely we can have faith that size, faith in a God who calls us to work for justice and to fight against oppression, even in the face of our position by the world all around us, just as Saint Francis himself faced in preaching a gospel of nonviolence, yes, but also a gospel that called Christians to be willing to place everything on the line who could not in the cause of those on the margins, those who were most vulnerable, those who could not speak for themselves, and who would not be heard, even if they had tried.

Jesus's message, amplified by servants like Saint Francis, is just as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago. Especially now, as we are plunged into a world in which the nihilistic pursuit of power and wealth justifies or, kidnapping, violence, and even contemplates genocide.

Jesus's entire life of ministry on this earth was lived in the pursuit of embodying God's justice-- which is not based on punishment and violence, but on love and mercy and grace. It is a life that we who follow Jesus are also charged with taking up as our calling: like Jesu, to give of ourselves and of our resources to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, welcome the stranger and the homeless, and transcend barriers.

This is the heart of the gospel, this is what Saint Francis sought to embody in his life, and what we are called to embody in ours. We are not called to silence and apathy in the face of the pain and suffering that swirls around us. We are called to seize hold of our mustard seed faith, to plant it in the soil of the love that God has for each and every one of us, and then to share that faith in action abundantly by standing up for those who are unable to stand up for themselves. We are called especially to renounce a gospel of hatred, a gospel of destruction, a gospel of exploiting human and beast and forest for the profit of only a few.

On the day Saint Francis died, he said to his followers, "We have only begun to practice the gospel." Seven hundred years later, those words still ring true, and yet we have the assurance that God calls us into relationship with each other through even the tiniest amount of faith, faith which is in itself can achieve miracles. Amen.

Readings:

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Psalm 37:1-10
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

Preached at the 505 on October 4 and the 10:30 Eucharist on October 5, 2025.

Restoring the Vineyard: Sermon for Proper 22A

Today, a day in which we celebrate the feast of St. Francis, I decided to stick with the lectionary readings for this Sunday in the regular lectionary cycle. And now, I am berating myself for not taking the easier path. Because this parable in the gospel before us is hardly on anyone’s top ten list of beloved stories. It is instead filled with corruption, violence, and murder. If that weren’t enough, over two thousand years it has been interpreted by far too many in the Church to justify the exclusion and even attempted extinction of the Jews, claiming that they forfeited their position as God’s “chosen people” when “the Jews” denied Jesus’s authority.

And that is anti-Semitism and hate, my friends. Jesus, after all, was a Jew for his entire earthly ministry. No, it is important to circle back and remember that when Jesus tells a parable, it is important to read it as though it applies to us—exactly how Jesus himself used his parables. And of course, that is the LAST thing we want to do with this one—because those main characters are AWFUL.

In order to faithfully engage this parable, then, we have to do one of the hardest things for us to do in 21st century America: to lean INTO our discomfort. To accept that this story has something to say about us. To acknowledge that we are not mere bystanders but participants in the injustices that surround us.

It is way too easy to use these parables to point the finger at others—even those who historically have been marginalized already, like the Jews. So let’s take a breath, and ask ourselves to consider how we ourselves are the evil tenants in Jesus's parable.

The genius of Jesus’s parables is that they can be applied to many different situations. Those who heard Jesus's parables at the time understood the vineyard to be a symbol for Israel, and since they were Israelites, that means they understood what he was saying as seeking to correct their own behavior. Thus if we are to enter into these parables correctly, we cannot use them to judge others; instead we must see them as a mirror in which our own lives are reflected.

One of the theological claims attributed to St. Francis was a sense of unity and harmony in all creation, the idea that the love of God is revealed in the natural world, as St. Francis extolled in his “Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.” On this feast day of St. Francis, we can take the parable of the vineyard as a commentary on how we treat the Earth and all her creartures, which would align nicely with the concern St. Francis himself spoke of frequently.

What would it be like to see all of creation as beloved family, rather than tools or objects of exploitation? Too often we use poor interpretations of texts in Genesis to claim that God gave us human beings dominion over all of the earth. For some, that leads to ideas that we can use up this beautiful earth and its resources as we see fit. What if, instead, we saw ourselves as tenants, placed by God within the vineyard of the earth to tend it and care for it? In our parable before us today, the tenants try to steal what is not theirs—and they are willing to kill and destroy in order to accomplish that theft. Yet, as we are reminded in the opening verses of Psalm 24—the one that comes right after the beloved 23rd Psalm:

1 The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it,
the world and its inhabitants too.
2 Because God is the one who established it on the seas;
God set it firmly on the waters.
3 Who can ascend the Lord’s mountain?
Who can stand in his holy sanctuary?
4 Only the one with clean hands and a pure heart;
the one who hasn’t made false promises,
the one who hasn’t sworn dishonestly.
5 That kind of person receives blessings from the Lord
and righteousness from the God who saves.
6 And that’s how things are
with the generation that seeks him—
that seeks the face of Jacob’s God.

                                    —(from the Common English Bible)

We, like those murderous tenants, reject the sovereignty of God when we look at rising seas and melting glaciers, and at devastating wildfires and catastrophic floods that have gone from being once in a lifetime events to yearly events, and say we can do nothing or deny that we have anything to do with such devastation. It’s dishonest—and in this case, foolhardy-- to claim powerlessness right in the midst of our simultaneous proclamation that we can do anything we want, without consequences.

We could also see the vineyard as being the ground of our hearts. Do we acknowledge God’s ownership of that territory? Or do we reject Jesus and throw him out when he asks of us what we do not wish to give: our time, talent, and treasure? Do we reject Jesus and throw him from the vineyard of our hearts when, in response to the new life he offers us not as a gift, we instead see a threat to our insistence on our utter and complete independence? We throw Jesus from the vineyard by our resistance to empathy and love of each other so that we can be instead be selfish and cruel.

The way of God cannot be aligned with contempt for God’s creation, or with a delight in cruelty or mockery.

We always have to remember that a vineyard is judged by the fruit it produces. 

And hateful, careless behavior from people who claim to be faithful children of God is a large part of why so many people are turning their backs on faith. As Christian convert G. K. Chesterton cynically noted, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

I like to think he was speaking out of his own despair and frustration. The vineyard is the Christian ideal of abundance, compassion, justice, that leads to true peace. Which brings us back to St. Francis.

Even though most scholars realize that it is highly unlikely that St. Francis actually wrote the famous peace prayer that bears his name that we will pray together in a few moments, nonetheless the sentiments in that prayer beautifully express the components of a society grounded in love, justice and peace—one in which injustice, cruelty, and contempt for each other and this world truly become unimaginable. 

That same sentiment is also found in this beautiful poem by farmer/environmentalist, and poet Wendell Berry, entitled, “The Peace of Wild Things:”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.

Amen to that.

What if each of us resisted the despair of the world, a world who groans and asks us for love and protection, by dedicating ourselves to changing despair to hope, and hope to action? What if we resisted the despair of the world by remembering our oneness with this beautiful planet, and with every single person and thing in it and on it? What if we welcomed the Owner of All and his beloved Son into the vineyard of our hearts, instead of the wilderness of our fear? In the words of Joni Mitchell: “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

In the end, even the parable of the Murderous Tenants contains good news, however, because it is about justice and reclamation, about embracing the generous love of God and being remade by it. Jesus’s parables call on us to re-imagine the world, and to re-imagine our lives, if we allowed ourselves to be fertile ground and faithful tenants within the abundant vineyard of God.

Amen.

Preached at the 5:15 outdoor Eucharist and pet blessing on October 3, and at the 10:30 worship service on October 4 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

Citations:

1) Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things," from Openings: Poems (1968).

Prayer, day 2441: For the Feast of St. Francis

Our God and our All, 
we place ourselves within the bounds of your peace, 
and give You thanks for your lovingkindness. 
Let your light shine in our hearts 
like Brother Sun and Sister Moon and all the stars, 
that we may walk in peace and joy. 
You have placed our feet upon Mother Earth, 
who sustains us and provides us our food: 
may we honor and tend her in love. 
As we pass through this day, your gift, 
may we be gentle and forgiving to all, 
praising You, O God, in all that we are, do, and say. 
Enlighten our minds, 
that we may act from a perfect charity, 
and sing forth your praises always. 
You are love and peace, Lord Christ: 
 draw into your embrace 
all those whom we remember before you as we pray.

Amen.

Embodying Peace: Speaking to the Soul, October 4, 2017

Today, on the Feast of St. Francis, many churches across the United States will be holding prayer services or vigils as we again gather and attempt to make sense of yet another mass murder at the hands of a rampaging gunman in Las Vegas. Once again, we are confronted with the claim, “Worst Mass Murder in US History,” and we use words like “unimaginable,” and “shocking.” Once again we see photos of people whose lives have been violently cut short, and hear stories of other people whose lives have been radically changed forever among the wounded, the first responders, and their families. Once again we are left with shock, rage, sorrow. One again we debate whether now is the time to act to take concrete action to repudiate the forces that make our country the gun violence capital of the industrialized world.

We need peace—real peace. Which brings us back to St. Francis.

Even though most scholars realize that it is highly unlikely that St. Francis actually wrote the famous peace prayer that bears his name, nonetheless the sentiments in that prayer beautifully express the components of a society grounded in love, justice and peace—one in which, no matter what we keep saying, events like those that have battered us this week, and almost every single day this year, truly become unimaginable.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.

One of the theological claims attributed to St. Francis was a sense of unity and harmony in all creation, the idea that the love of God is revealed in the natural world, as St. Francis extolled in his Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon. What if each of us dedicated ourselves to being a means of bringing about peace, pardon, unity, and light? What if we stopped ourselves when tempted to hatred, discord, despair, or darkness, and instead acted in concrete ways to cast aside our fragile, jagged veneer of cynicism, choosing instead to embody love, faith, hope, and light? This changing of direction is emblematic of true repentance, which at its most basic means to radically change direction and try a new path. Especially if the path we are currently on leads to so much suffering and pain, repentance actually represents the way of wisdom and hope.

O Master, let me not seek
as much to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

This section of the prayer reinforces the outward focus of our actions as the manifestation of the gospel, and it stands out as upending of the values of our society that only serve to separate us, to set us one against the other, and instead celebrate the divine love that binds us together and encourages to see the face of Christ in every face. It is in this giving that we are rendered fully aware of the dignity and worth of every living thing, made beautiful by the imprint God has placed within each part of creation—to see that, in the words of the poet and mystic Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

Even as we are plunged into a time of overwhelming sorrow, there is power in knowing that together we grieve, but then we can choose to honor those who have lost their lives by this time not turning back to our own concerns. We can choose to take Christ’s call to us to be disciples into our hearts and be transformed. We can choose to become instruments of peace. The gospel of Christ offers us that power—if we believe. And then choose to act, in the name of the love, and the community that love makes of us, as disciples walking in the way of Christ.

Dare we believe in what we claim?

(This piece was first published on The Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on October 4, 2017)

God's Promise of Love

Statue from Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery, Naperville, IL
(not my photo, but I would love a copy of this statue)

Readings:

Genesis9:8-17

Matthew 6:25-33

This week (on October 4, actually), it is our tradition to commemorate the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, who is remembered as one who extolled the integrity, the oneness of creation, one who saw all of the universe, from the Sun and the Moon to even the tiniest creatures, as giving praise to the God and Creator of All. Our two readings today reflect that spirit of the joyful honoring of creation that Francis taught.

In our gospel today, Jesus reminds us of the joyful person he was during his earthly ministry. That’s important—too often the humor and happiness of Jesus gets lost, especially as we move closer to Jerusalem and his Passion. In our passage from Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tenderly reminds us about the joy and beauty present in the most common things we tend to overlook in our distracted race through each day. He calls us to live in each moment joyfully, bathed in God’s love.

Because it is so hard to fully live into each moment, we instead too often fall into the trap of feeling isolated from each other. That false sense of isolation leads to anxiety like Jesus was addressing, and that anxiety fools us into believing we are separate from one another. We see the effects of this belief right now in our city and throughout society. Anxiety and fear and isolation make us forget God’s promise of love and care.

Yet God’s promises to us are written into the very bonds of love that bind us to God, to each other, and to every living thing on the earth. That covenant that God established after the Great Flood was not just with Noah, but with both humans and all creation, plants and birds and all that lives, which, some scientists maintain, includes our very planet itself as a living organism, if one takes a broad enough view. The covenant story we heard from Genesis reminds us that creation is a full partner in our relationship with God, and gives God praise and glory.

Jesus reminds us that God’s love restores and renews us, so long as we center ourselves within each moment enough to feel that shared love. It is there in the joyful songs of birds whose welcome sings the morning into being. It is there in the lowliest, tiniest wildflower growing in a roadside ditch, turning its hopeful face toward the sun.

Instead of worry, Jesus calls us back to mindfulness, an important spiritual practice in many world religions. And not just any mindfulness, but the mindfulness of remembering how fully and thoroughly God loves us and through that love binds us together. Coming back to awareness of our unity with all living things is a wonderful place to start.

We see here in this anecdote that Jesus was a keen observer of the beauty of creation, and that he had spent time savoring the awareness of the birds singing and building their nests, and the sight of wildflowers—what some might call weeds—cloaking the fields and hills in beauty in a myriad of colors, all the hues of the rainbow mentioned in our first reading. Both the rainbow and the raiment of the most humble flower are signs to us of the promise God maintains with us and with all creation to love us and care for us always—not just in the distant past but right now and forever. Every living thing reminds us that God’s wondrous love bears the world into being and sustains it in every moment.

Luckily, we are also reminded of God’s love especially in the love and faithfulness of our companion animals, whose steadfast joy in us models to us the love and devotion we ourselves are made to exhibit toward our God.

Canines and cats, reptiles and rats,

Cows and conies, hamsters and ponies,

Sugar gliders and hedgehogs

potbellied pigs and guinea pigs (who aren’t pigs at all),

fishes and fowl of all kinds—

they show their devotion to us unswervingly. The very presence of all these living creatures in our lives remind us of God’s love. They remind us, also, that we are charged from the very first story in scripture with service to the earth and all the living things upon it and within it. Even the smallest creature has been placed on Earth to support the web of life on this planet, from humans to honeybees, and none is dispensible—not even wasps or mosquitos, who, I have to admit, are not my favorites.

Our companion animals’ devotion exemplifies the devotion we owe God. Their love exemplifies the love we are called to bear for each other, no matter our differences. St. Francis reminded us that all of creation participates in demonstrating God’s love—the same lesson Jesus taught us today in this gospel passage from Matthew. Each creature is a reminder of God’s blessing to and love for us. It is that holy and limitless love that binds all things together, just as mutual forces of gravity and attraction hold galaxies and stars in their courses as they dance through space.

I’ll close with this: I once heard a clergyman boast that he had never participated in an animal blessing of any sort, claiming it was undignified. Yet what could be more dignified and good and right than acknowledging our dependence upon this good earth and all its inhabitants, especially in this day and time? What could be more important than exhibiting out mindfulness of the holy love embodied in every wagging tail or rough kitten kiss?

But perhaps we have got it backwards. Perhaps it’s the least we can do once a year to bless our pets, who spend every moment blessing us, through their love, with the reminder of how devotedly God loves us.

(This reflection was given at Christ Church Cathedral, St. Louis, MO, at the 5 pm Blessing of the Animals on October 1, 2017)